The landing of InSight, NASA's newest lander, on Mars will be streamed live on the space agency's website and social media pages on Nov. 26.
Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport or InSight is expected to touch down on the surface of the red planet at 3 p.m. EST. Its landing site is Elysium Planitia, the smooth flat plain north of the equator. It is about 373 miles away from Gale Crater where Curiosity landed in 2012.
InSight Landing Live Stream
On Wednesday, Nov. 14, NASA released a broadcast schedule. Activities will begin on Nov. 21 with two news conferences to discuss mission engineering and science overviews. On. Nov. 25, NASA will give a pre-landing update at 1 p.m. while the InSight team will answer questions on the space agency's social media pages.
On Nov. 26, landing day, there will be a live landing commentary on NASA Television from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. The landing will also be streamed YouTube.com and Ustream.tv.
In addition, there will be about 80 live viewing parties in sites across the United States and around the world.
InSight Arrives In Mars
InSight was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5 aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket. It is the first lander to visit the red planet since Curiosity, which arrived in Mars six years ago.
The goal of the new lander is to become the first to study the deep interior of the red planet. It will measure the heat flow, seismology, and track precision of Earth's neighboring planet to answer key questions about its early formation more than 4 billion years ago.
By studying the interior structure of Mars, scientists hope to uncover how rocky planets in the inner solar system such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed and evolved.
InSight is accompanied to Mars by two mini-spacecraft comprising Mars Cube One or MarCO. The first deep-space mission by CubeSats will make a Mars flyby and relay data from the lander as it enters the atmosphere of the red planet and lands on its surface later this month.
